Handbook business process management pdf

Description Details Hashtags Report an issue Book Description This book covers the entire Business Process Management BPM lifecycle, from process identification to process monitoring, covering along the way process modelling, analysis, redesign and automation.

Concepts, methods and tools from business management, computer science and industrial engineering are blended into one comprehensive and inter-disciplinary approach. The presentation is illustrated using the BPMN industry standard defined by the Object Management Group and widely endorsed by practitioners and vendors worldwide.

In addition to explaining the relevant conceptual background, the book provides dozens of examples, more than exercises - many with solutions - and numerous suggestions for further reading. OpenText Business Process Management BPM delivers improved business insight, higher process velocity, and greater desired business impact through strategic planning, automation, and optimization of business processes.

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Category: Managing Quality. The purpose of this research is to explore the ways of integrating situational awareness into business process management for the purpose of realising hyper automated…. This paper aims to propose a conceptual framework to integrate a maturity model to the supply chain SC strategy, in order to understand how a maturity model can be….

The conscious treatment of business processes as significant corporate assets has facilitated substantial improvements in organizational performance but is also used to ensure the conformance of corporate activities.

This Handbook presents in two volumes the contemporary body of knowledge as articulated by the world' s leading BPM thought leaders. This first volume focuses on arriving at a sound definition of BPM approaches and examines BPM methods and process-aware information systems. As such, it provides guidance for the integration of BPM into corporate methodologies and information systems.

Each chapter has been contributed by leading international experts. Selected case studies complement their views and lead to a summary of BPM expertise that is unique in its coverage of the most critical success factors of BPM.

This service is more advanced with JavaScript available. Editors view affiliations Jan vom Brocke Michael Rosemann. Front Matter Pages i-xix. Front Matter Pages What is Business Process Management? Pages Process Management for Knowledge Work. Process infrastructure. Performers need to be supported by IT and HR systems if they are to discharge process responsibilities. Functionally fragmented information systems do not support integrated processes, and conventional HR systems train- ing, compensation, and career, etc.

Integrated systems such as ERP systems and results-based compensation systems are needed for integrated processes. Process owner. In a conventional organization, no one is responsible for an end- to-end process, and so no one will be in a position to manage it on an end-to-end basis i. An organization serious about its processes must have process owners: senior managers with authority and responsibility for a process across the organization as a whole.

They are the ones who perform the work illustrated in Fig. Having some but not all of these enablers for a process is of little or no value. For instance, a well-designed process targeted at the right metrics will not succeed if performers are not capable of carrying it out or if the systems do not support them in doing so. Implementing a process in effect means putting in place these five enablers. Without them, a process may be able to operate successfully for a short term but will certainly fail in the long run.

Some do so effectively, while others do not. The root cause of this discrepancy lies in whether or not an enterprise possesses four critical capabilities that are prerequisites to its summoning the resources, determination, and skills needed to succeed with processes Hammer The absolute sine qua non for effective deployment of process management is engaged, knowledgeable, and passionate senior executive leader- ship of the effort.

Introducing processes means introducing enormous change — realigning systems, authority, modes of operation, and more. Hammer that most organizations have experienced that can compare to the disruption that the transition to process brings. Unless a very senior executive makes it his or her personal mission, process will run aground on the shoals of inertia and resistance. Moreover, only a topmost executive can authorize the significant resources and changes that process implementation requires.

Without such leadership, the effort is doomed; with it, all other problems can be overcome. Process, with its focus on customers, outcomes, and transcending bound- aries is anathema to those who are focused on defending their narrow bit of turf.

Process demands that people at all levels of the organization put the customer first, be comfortable working in teams, accept personal responsibility for out- comes, and be willing to accept change. If the enterprise culture is not aligned with these values, leadership must change the culture so that it does. Moving to process management, and institutionalizing it over the long run, requires a set of governance mechanisms that assign appropriate respon- sibilities and ensure that processes integrate with one another and do not turn into a new generation of horizontal silos.

In addition to process owners, enterprises need a process office headed by a Chief Process Officer that plans and oversees the program as a whole and coordinates process efforts, as well as a Process Council.

This is a body consisting of the process owners, the executive leader, and other senior managers, which serves as a strategic oversight body, setting direction and priorities, addressing cross-process issues, and translating enterprise concerns into process issues. These mechanisms need to be put in place to manage the transition to process, but continue on as the essential management superstructure for a process-managed enterprise.

Implementing and managing processes is a complex and high stakes endeavor, not for the inexperienced or the amateur. Companies need cadres of people with deep expertise in process design and implementation, metrics, change management, program management, process improvement, and other relevant techniques. These people must have formal methodologies to follow and must be sustained with appropriate career paths and management support.

While not an insuperable barrier, many organizations fail to develop and institutionalize this capability, and then unsurprisingly find themselves unable to carry out their ambi- tious programs. Organizations without these four capabilities will be unable to make process management work, and must undertake urgent efforts to put them in place. Developing leadership is the most challenging of these; it typically requires the intervention of a catalyst, a passionate advocate of process with the ear of a potential leader, who must patiently familiarize the candidate with the concepts of process and their payoffs.

Reshaping culture is not, despite myths to the contrary, impossible, but it does take time and energy. The other two are less difficult, but are often overlooked. All work is process work. Sometimes the assumption is made that the concepts of process and process management only apply to highly structured, transactional work, such as order fulfillment, procurement, customer service, and the like.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The virtues of process also adhere to developmental processes, which center on highly creative tasks, such as product development, demand creation, and so on.

Process should not be misinterpreted as a synonym for routinization or automation, reducing creative work to simplistic procedures. Process means positioning individual work activities — routine or creative — in the larger context of the other activities with which it combines to create results. Both transactional and development processes are what is known as core processes — processes that create value for external customers and so are essential to the business.

Organizations also have enabling or support processes, which create value for internal customers; these include hire to retire, information systems development, and financial reporting. Such processes have customers and create value for them as must any process, by definition , but those customers are internal. The third category is governing processes, the management processes by means of which the company is run such as strategic planning, risk management, and performance management.

Process management is itself a governing pro- cess! All processes need to be managed as such and so benefit from the power of process management. Any process is better than no process. Absent a well-defined process design, chaos reigns. Individual heroics, capriciousness, and improvisation rule the day — and results are inconsistent and unsustainable. A well-defined process will at the least deliver predictable, repeatable results, and can serve as the staging ground for improvement.

A good process is better than a bad process. This statement is not as tautological as it seems. It expresses the criticality of process design, that the caliber of a process design is a critical determinant of its performance, and that some processes are better designed than others. If a company is burdened with a bad process design, it needs to replace it with a better one.

One process version is better than many. Standardizing processes across all parts of an enterprise presents a single face to customers and suppliers, yields profound economies in support services such as training and IT systems, allows the redeployment of people from one business unit to another, and yields a host of other benefits.

These payoffs must be balanced against the intrinsically different needs of different units and their customers, but our bias should be in favor of standardization.

Even a good process must be performed effectively. Hammer combined with carefully managed execution, so that the capabilities of the design are realized in practice. Even a good process can be made better. The process owner needs to stay constantly vigilant, looking for opportunities to make modifications to the process design in order to further enhance its performance.

Every good process eventually becomes a bad process. No process stays effec- tive forever in the face of change. Customer needs change, technologies change, competition changes, and what used to be a high level of performance becomes a poor one — and it is time to replace the formerly good process with a new one.

Figure 1 is an example of such an EPM, from a large distributor of industrial products. An effective EPM should be simple and clear, fitting on one page, and typically including no more than 5—10 core processes. Such a high-level representation is then decomposed to provide additional detail, breaking each top-level process into a number of subprocesses, which are further decomposed into activities. There is as yet no standard nor even near-standard notation or architecture for process representation or for how many levels of detail are appropriate.

The EPM does more than just provide a vocabulary for a process program. The EPM provides such an operational perspective on the enterprise and as such should be used as the basis for managing those operations. In particular, the EPM offers a way of dealing with the projects and programs that constantly changing times raise, since ultimately every business issue must be translated into its impacts on and implications for operating processes.

The follow- ing is a representative set of such issues that companies have recently needed to address: l A risk management group has identified areas of high risk to the company.

The processes that impact these risks need to be identified and redesigned in ways to help mitigate them. The company needs to determine those process metrics that are drivers of these KPIs and update them appropriately. The EPM needs to be used as an active management tool for situations like these.

More than that, companies focused on their processes need automated tools to help them actively manage their processes, for purposes like these and others. Vendors with very different offerings, providing different features and supporting different needs, all claim the mantle of BPMS. However, to oversimplify, but slightly, contemporary BPMS software is principally used for two kinds of purposes: to create descriptions of processes in terms of their constituent activities , which can be used to support process analysis, simulation, and design efforts; and to generate executable code that supports the performance of a process, by automating certain process steps, integrating systems and data- bases used by the process, and managing the workflow of documents and other forms passing through the process.

While as is often the case in the software industry vendor claims and market research forecasts for these systems are somewhat exaggerated, they nonetheless do provide value and have been success- fully deployed by many companies. Unfortunately, despite the name, contempo- rary BPM systems do little to support the management of processes rather than their analysis and implementation. A software system designed to support true process management would build on the capabilities that contemporary BPMS products provide to define and model processes , but go far beyond them.

As such, it could serve as a powerful tool to support management decision-making and action in a complex, fast-changing environment. Such a model would not be populated by data created by operational systems but by a rich representation of the enterprise. It would be a tool for managing processes and not for executing them.

There are no built-in semantics in contemporary systems that capture the characteristics of organizations and their many dimensions, nor do they have an embedded model of process management.

Even companies that have implemented it are far from finished and many companies — indeed many industries — have yet really to begin. Unsurprisingly, there are a host of issues with which we have yet to come to grips, issues that relate to truly managing an enterprise around its processes and to the impacts of Business Process Management on people, organizations, and economies.

The following is a sampler of such issues, some of which are being actively investigated, some of which define challenges for the future. Management structure and responsibility. As more power and authority get vested in process owners, other management roles and responsibilities change dramatically. Functional managers become managers of resource pools; business unit heads become agents of customers, representing their needs to process owners.

These are radical shifts, and are still being worked out. Some companies are experi- menting with moving many standard processes not just support ones from multiple business units into what amounts to shared service organizations. Others are out- sourcing whole processes. The shape of the process-managed enterprise is still emerging. IT support.

How do developments in new information technologies impact processes and process management? ERP systems somewhat belatedly have come to be recognized as process software systems, since their cross-functional architecture enables them to address work on an end-to-end basis. What implica- tions will SOA service-oriented architecture have on process design and imple- mentation? How will process management impact data management?

For instance, some companies are starting to give process owners responsibilities for master data management. Interenterprise processes. Most organizations focus on processes that run end- to-end within their companies; however, in many cases, the real ends of these processes reside in different companies altogether. Some companies have been working on these pro- cesses, but we lack models for their governance and management.

Who is the process owner? How should benefits be allocated? What are the right metrics? Hammer Standards. Are there standard EPMs for companies in the same industry? Are there standard sets of enabling and governing processes that all companies should deploy? Will we see the emergence of best-in-class process designs for certain widely occurring processes, which many different companies will implement?

What would these developments imply for enterprise differentiation? Processes and strategy. Processes are, on the one hand, the means by which enterprise strategies are realized. On the other, they can also be determinants of such strategies.

A company that has a world-class process can deploy it in new markets and in support of new products and services. At the same time, companies may decide that processes that do not offer competitive advantage should conform to industry standards or be outsourced. Industry structure. How will process management affect the structure of industries? As companies recognize that certain processes represent their core capabilities, while others are peripheral, will we see greater outsourcing of the latter — perhaps to organizations that will provide processes on a service basis?

Will customer and supplier organizations intertwine their processes to create what are in effect opera- tional rather than financial keiretsus? Beyond these macro questions, even the basic aspects of process management — designing processes, developing metrics, training performers, and all the rest — are far from settled issues.

There is much work to be done. But even absent solutions to these challenges, it is clear that process management has moved from the wave of the future to the wave of the present, and that we are indeed in the Age of Process. References Deming WE Statistical techniques in industry. Davenport Abstract In this chapter, the topic of using process improvement approaches to improve knowledge work is addressed.

The effective performance of knowledge work is critical to contemporary sophisticated economies. It is suggested that traditional, engineering-based approaches to knowledge work are incompatible with the autonomy and work approaches of many knowledge workers. Therefore, a variety of alternative process-oriented approaches to knowledge work are described. Empha- sis is placed on differentiating among different types of knowledge work and applying process interventions that are more behaviorally sensitive.

In sophisticated economies, they are the horses that pull the plow of economic progress. If our companies are going to be more profitable, if our strategies are going to be successful, if our societies and economies are going to become more advanced — it will be because knowledge workers did their work in a more productive and effective manner. In the early twenty-first century, it is likely that a quarter to a half of the workers in advanced economies are knowledge workers whose primary tasks involve the manipulation of knowledge and information.

Even if they are not a majority of all workers, they have the most influence on their companies and economies. They 1 This chapter draws from several published sources, including Chaps.

Davenport are paid the most, they add the most economic value, and they are the greatest determinant of the worth of their companies. It is already apparent that the firms with the highest degree and quality of knowl- edge work tend to be the fastest-growing and the most profitable ones. Leading IT firms, which are almost exclusively knowledge-based, are among the most profitable organizations in the history of the planet. Knowledge workers in management roles come up with new strategies.

Knowledge workers in marketing package up products and services in ways that appeal to customers. Without knowledge workers, there would be no new products and services, and no growth. Yet, despite the importance of knowledge workers to the economic success of countries, companies, and other groups, they have not received sufficient attention. In this chapter, I will describe how business process management — not in its traditional formulation, but using several modified variants of the idea — can contribute to better performance of knowledge work.

To treat something as a process is to impose a formal structure on it — to identify its beginning, end, and intermediate steps, to clarify who the customer is for it, to measure it, to take stock of how well it is currently being performed, and ultimately to improve it. But knowledge work and knowledge workers have not often been subject to this sort of analysis. In some cases, they have actively avoided it, and in others, it escaped application to them by happenstance. Knowledge workers often have the power to resist being told what to do, and process analysis is usually a sophisticated approach to having someone else tell you how to do your job.

It is not easy to view knowledge work in terms of processes, because much of it involves thinking, and it is often collaborative and iterative, which makes it difficult to structure. When I had interviewed knowledge workers about their jobs, they had often said that they did not think that their workdays were consistent and repeatable enough to be viewed as processes.

This does not mean, of course, that a process perspective could not be applied, or that there could not be more structure to knowledge work jobs — only that there has not been thus far. Given the historical antipathy of knowledge workers to formalized processes, it is an obvious question to ask how a process orientation is in their interest.

Many knowledge workers will view a formal process approach as a bureaucratic, proce- dural annoyance. A much more appealing possibility is that a process orientation is beneficial to knowledge workers — that they would benefit from the discipline and structure that a process brings, while remaining free to be creative and improvisa- tional when necessary and desirable.

In other words, a process can be viewed as art rather than science Hall and Johnson Whether this is true, of course, varies by the process involved, by the way a process is implemented and managed, and by the particular individuals involved. There is some case for optimism in this regard, however. Several researchers studied the issue of what happens to one type of knowledge workers — software developers — as a process orientation increases Adler et al.

The researchers looked at two groups within a company that were at CMM Level 5, the highest level of process maturity, and two other groups in the same firm at Level 3. They found that, for the most part, software developers experienced the increased process orientation as positive. Of course, the findings do not necessarily generalize to all knowledge work, and much more research is needed.

There will probably also be cases in which knowledge workers will actively resist or ignore a process orientation. In these cases, imposing it becomes a power struggle. The outcome of such struggles will vary across situations, but adopting more effective and productive processes in many industries may sometimes conflict with knowledge worker autonomy.

Other industries are likely to face similar tradeoffs. In the matrix shown in Fig. These workers typically have a more iterative, collaborative approach to work for which patterns are more difficult to discern. And if a process analyst should figure out a process to recommend to these workers, they have the power and the independence to be able to successfully resist it.

Collaborative Integration Model Collaboration Model Groups Systematic, repeatable work Improvisational work Highly reliant on formal Highly reliant on deep expertise processes, methodologies or across multiple functional standards Dependent on fluid deployment Interdependence Dependent on tight integration of flexible teams across functional boundaries Level of Transaction Model Expert Model Routine work Judgement-oriented work Highly reliant on formal rules, Highly reliant on individual procedures and training expertise and experience Dependent on low discretion Dependent on star performers workfroce or automation.

Integration work is often fairly structured, although higher levels of collaboration often lead to more process complexity. Integration-oriented workers are relatively likely to adopt process interventions.

Expert work can be made more process-oriented, but experts themselves often resist an imposed process. Of course, it is not a binary question whether a process orientation is relevant to a particular type of knowledge work. For each of these types, there are rules of thumb about how best to move in a more process-oriented direction: Transaction workers. These workers need to understand the flow of their work and the knowledge needed to perform it, but they rarely have time to consult external guidelines or knowledge sources.

Fortunately, it is often relatively easy to embed a process flow into some form of computer-based application. These typically involve structured workflows or scripts. Such systems usually bring the work — and all information and knowledge required to perform it — to the worker, and they measure the process and worker productivity at the same time. Integration workers. With this type of work, it is possible to articulate the process to be followed in documents, and workers typically have enough time and discretion to consult the documents.

There is nothing new about describing a process, but the practice continues across many industries. Medical technicians, for example, often follow health care protocols in administering tests and treatments. Expert workers. These workers have high autonomy and discretion in their work, but there are some examples of organizations, such as several leading health care providers, which have applied technology to key aspects of the process in their cases, ordering medications, tests, referrals, and other medical actions Davenport and Glaser But unless there is a way to embed a computer into the middle of the work process, experts will be a challenge from the standpoint of structuring work.

Instead of specifying detailed aspects of the workflow, those who attempt to improve expert knowledge work should provide templates, sample outputs, and high-level guidelines. It is unlikely that expert workers will pay much attention to detailed process flows anyway. Collaboration workers. As I have noted, this is the most difficult category to address in traditional process terms. The cautions above for experts also apply to collaborators — a gentle process touch is desirable.

Rather than issuing process flow charts, specifying and measuring outputs, instilling a customer orientation, and fostering a sense of urgency are likely intervention approaches.